


Favorite Prisoner (Would Beg to Differ)

by Lazy8



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [18]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Claustrophobia, Gen, Humiliation, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Mind Games, Missing Scene, Muzzles, Nonsexual Nudity, Prisoner abuse, Psychological Torture, Sensory Deprivation, Solitary Confinement, broken fingers, the boiling rock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:01:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27883432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lazy8/pseuds/Lazy8
Summary: The Boiling Rock is a horrible place.Dealing with the Princess is worse.
Relationships: Azula & Suki (Avatar), Suki & Ty Lee (Avatar)
Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1846456
Comments: 1
Kudos: 27
Collections: Bad Things Happen Bingo





	Favorite Prisoner (Would Beg to Differ)

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt:** Muzzled  
>  **Hurt Character:** Suki  
>  **Comforting Character(s):** None

The Boiling Rock was a horrible place.

When Suki and the rest of her Warriors had been subdued, stripped of their uniforms, and been forced to witness their whole culture being appropriated by those three Fire Nation girls, she'd thought _that_ was the low point of her life. Lying on the hard ground, stripped down to her underclothes and watching one of those other girls holding up _her_ dress with an expression of utmost disgust while another rifled through their things, alternately tossing them carelessly aside and stuffing them into her pockets with an exclamation of "Ooh, pretty!" as if she were rummaging through a secondhand sale rather than looting stolen goods and appropriating the time-honored traditions of someone else's people, Suki had been sure that things couldn't get much worse than this.

Before the Kyoshi Warriors regained control of their limbs, their hands and ankles were cuffed. Some Fire Nation soldiers were summoned, who then proceeded to hoist them up and throw them into the back of a wagon like so many sacks of rice.

They were not given clothes. They were not even given a _blanket_ to cover their nudity or protect them from the elements.

They'd spent the next few weeks in the brig of a Fire Nation warship, in hard metal cells with three to a bed and no sight of the sun. One by one, they were dragged from their cells by a pair of guards, where their heads were dunked into a bucket and the makeup roughly wiped from their faces. They'd set watches, after, partly so the rest of them would have more room to lie down, but mostly for fear of what the guards might try if they were caught off-guard.

It could have been worse. It could have been _better_ , but it also could have been much, _much_ worse. Their captors sneered as they hastily pulled on the prison rags they were given, because it was take the rags or remain half-naked and nobody wanted to think about the sorts of liberties the guards might take if they felt they could get away with it. They forced down the vile slop and brackish water that was their daily allotment, because the only alternative was to starve and none of them were ready to give up just yet.

Somewhere shortly after the tenth meal (in these conditions, it was impossible to keep track of the days), Toki had a breakdown. She was the youngest of the Kyoshi Warriors, having earned her fans less than a year before they'd left the island. It was sudden, too: one minute she was chatting with Mika, the next she was throwing herself at the bars and screaming, tears running down her face.

"Keep an eye on her," Suki ordered after Toki had finally cried herself out and fallen into an exhausted sleep. "And keep an eye out for danger signs in each other, too. Remember, we're Kyoshi Warriors. We look out for each other, no matter what."

If she'd been aware that the guards stationed nearby were listening, and that they'd been ordered to report back on everything the prisoners said, she might have taken a bit more care with her words.

* * *

When they arrived, after who-knew-how-long, at a prison right at the heart of the Fire Nation capital, Suki thought once more that things couldn't get much worse.

It wasn't actually _that_ much worse than their time in transit. In some respects, it was even better: they were allowed daily exercise, and now at least they got to see the sun once in a while. In other respects, though… well. In other respects.

Of course, they had no intention of sitting out the rest of the war in a Fire Nation prison—not when they'd only just gotten invested. They made their first escape attempt less than a week after the fact.

Naturally, it failed.

Now, Toki and Mika were in the infirmary with a sprained ankle and a burned shoulder, respectively, and the rest of them had been thrown into isolation, with Toki and Mika promised their own stint as soon as they'd recovered from their injuries.

The guards had _told_ them it would be a week. Once inside of the windowless metal box, though, it _felt_ like a whole lot longer.

After she'd been thrown in there, the first thing Suki did was feel out the walls. The whole thing was barely bigger than a coffin; she had to bring her knees in close against her chest to lie down, and when she stood, her head brushed the ceiling.

There was no light. Everything she learned about her surroundings, she had to learn by feel, sweeping her hands over the walls and floor and ceiling only to encounter nothing but thick walls and metal rivets. There was no bedding, only the hard metal floor. There was no chamber pot, only a small hole punched into the floor from which emanated a horrid stink (and which Suki first discovered by accidentally putting her foot into it).

In her explorations, she encountered a small grate, but try as she might, she was unable to open it from this side. (It wasn't nearly big enough for an adult to fit through, anyway, but her desperation by that point was drowning out all reason.) Instead, at regular intervals (or at least, she _assumed_ it was regular intervals, since she was rapidly losing all trust in her own perceptions), it would slide open with a horrible squealing sound.

"Hey! _Hey!_ " No matter how loudly she shouted, though, no one ever answered. Instead, whoever was on the other side would push something through the grate before it slammed shut once more.

The first time, she nearly tripped over the thing on the floor. Upon feeling it out, she quickly discovered that it was a tray, bearing a bowl of overcooked rice and a small cup of water.

When she ate, she had to eat by feel alone, groping around in the dark for the bowl and the chopsticks and doing her best not to accidentally stick her filthy fingers into the food. She quickly learned to drink the water first: if she knocked the cup over in her blind groping and spilled it, she wouldn't get another until her next meal.

After the first few meals, once she'd learned the routine, she made a practice of lunging for the grate the second she heard it open and trying to make a grab at whoever was on the other side. The first time, the only thing she managed to accomplish was knocking over her water. The second time, she spilled half the contents of the rice bowl all over the floor. The third time, the grate slammed down on her fingers and she spent the next few minutes (hours? _Days?_ ) curled up in the corner and cradling her hand to her chest, hoping against hope that her fingers hadn't been broken.

After that, she stopped trying.

When they finally let her out, she had to squeeze her eyes shut against the sudden influx of light. The first thing the guards did was blindfold her, and it spoke to just how shaken she was that she couldn't be sure whether the gesture was intended as a kindness or yet another method of humiliation and control. It was also telling that her first reaction to finally tasting that small bit of freedom wasn't joy or even relief, but rather a sudden spell of faintness. She was still hungry and thirsty. Her limbs were shaking so badly that she didn't even _try_ to put up a fight when the guards took hold of her arms and started leading her (she presumed) back to her cell. They walked her down a hallway, around several turns, and through one last door that slammed shut behind them, where they then pushed her down into a chair, securing her wrists and ankles in place with leather straps before finally removing the blindfold.

The hairs on the back of Suki's neck rose. They had _not_ taken her back to her cell.

Standing over her, mouth quirked upward in a smirk and twirling a strand of hair around one of her perfectly manicured nails, was the leader of the girls who'd captured and impersonated them. The one who bent blue fire.

"Well," she began, placing her free hand on her hip. Suki knew how to read people; if every gesture she made wasn't deliberate and meticulously planned, she'd eat her makeup. "I hear that _you've_ been quite the troublemaker lately."

Suki spat in her face.

When the girl slapped her in retaliation, Suki learned that those perfectly manicured nails had also been _sharpened_ , leaving four perfectly parallel lines of pain behind on her cheek. Suki held in her hiss of pain, unwilling to give the other girl the satisfaction of knowing she'd hurt her.

"See that she can't do that again." The other girl's voice was tight with fury as one of the guards scrambled to hand her a handkerchief. The other guard bowed low, her face nearly white with fear. "Yes, Your Highness."

Wait a minute… 'Your Highness'?

Prince Zuko was the one who'd burned down her village; she'd learned as much from Sokka, who'd also told her about how he'd since chased them all over the world and back in his efforts to capture the Avatar. During her time roaming the Earth Kingdom, Suki had heard at some point that the prince had a sibling… but this was the first she'd heard of the girl who'd fought and captured them being a member of the royal family.

Suki's stomach sank somewhere into the vicinity of her ankles. She was beginning to get the feeling that she was in deep, _deep_ trouble.

The guard who'd left came hurrying back in, carrying some sort of contraption that seemed to consist of equal parts metal and leather straps. Though Suki couldn't say she'd ever seen its like before, she could tell just by looking that this was something she didn't want anywhere _near_ her.

It seemed that she wasn't getting a choice, though. When the guards approached her with it, she did the only thing she _could_ do and attempted to bite their fingers; her token resistance earned her a slap upside the head that sent her ears ringing. During the few seconds of dazed confusion, a metal bar was forced between her teeth, then the guards were doing up the straps so tightly they dug into her scalp and chafed the corners of her mouth.

Muzzled. The Fire Nation princess had just ordered her _muzzled_.

"Ah yes, that's a _much_ better look on you." The princess made a show of studying her nails, which now bore just the faintest trace of blood on their pointed tips. "Now tell me: did you really think your little escape attempt was actually going to _work?_ "

Of course, Suki couldn't answer, and they both knew it. Then again, she didn't want to give the princess the satisfaction of actually _trying_ , so she instead put all of her focus into staying as still and silent as possible.

"Though I suppose it _is_ protocol to weed out the ringleader, and reserve the harshest punishment for _them_." She sighed, in the manner of someone facing a tedious task they didn't want to deal with. "So I guess that we're just going to have to question _everyone_ in your little group, and keep punishing _all_ of you until somebody tells me who the leader is."

_That_ one hit exactly where it was meant to. Suki's eyes went wide, and she attempted to shout at the princess: _It's me, I'm the leader,_ I'm _the one you want, punish me however you want but don't you_ dare _touch any of my girls…_ but the metal clamped between her teeth and pressing down on her tongue prevented her from articulating anything other than "Mmmmmmph mph mmmm!"

"Of course, you _could_ save me the trouble, and just _give_ me the information I want." The princess smirked, and what _had_ been only a suspicion now crystallized into certainty.

She'd _planned_ this. The princess might be cruel, but she wasn't _stupid_. She was clearly smart enough, and observant enough, to have noticed who'd taken the reins when they'd fought, and unless she'd already gone through this routine with every one of the others, the only reason she would have had the guards bring her Suki specifically was if she already knew full well that she was the leader. The princess was _toying_ with her.

Just because she was toying, though, didn't mean the threat wasn't real.

"What, nothing to say?" she asked after a few more minutes' worth of Suki shouting muffled, unintelligible threats and confessions and fighting to convey the magnitude of her hatred through the strength of her glare alone. "Well, that's too bad. Here's hoping the others will be more talkative." She waved at the guards. "Take her away. Oh, and _do_ make sure that she gets a bath." The princess wrinkled her nose with an exaggerated expression of disgust. "She smells like she just climbed out of a cow-pig sty." She turned on her heel and departed without another word.

The guards waited until the princess was well out of both sight and earshot before they un-muzzled her and released her from the chair.

* * *

The guards _did_ give her a bath… if by "bath" one meant forcing her to strip, then throwing buckets of water on her, sliding a bar of soap under the bars, and telling her to scrub, or else.

Though the humiliation had her gritting her teeth from beginning to end, Suki also followed their orders without protest and gave herself as thorough a scrubbing as she could manage. After all, she wanted to get the stink off of her skin just as much as they did.

This was also the first real chance she'd had to assess the damage to her fingers. They were black and blue, and at least one of them was _definitely_ broken; she couldn't grip the soap with that hand, and was forced to bathe one-handed. After the guards tossed her a clean uniform, she tore strips from it with her teeth and used them to wrap her fingers together.

They didn't put her back in with the other Kyoshi Warriors.

Suki knew that her girls would never sell her out—and right now, that was exactly the problem. If her suspicions were correct, there was very little the princess didn't already know, so the only thing they could hope to accomplish by holding out on her was to bring more suffering down on themselves. They might have been separated to prevent further conspiracies, but the next time she saw them—in the exercise yard, at mealtimes—she was going to have to tell them not to try to protect her if ( _when_ ) they were questioned. There was no point in _all_ of them being punished, and a good leader protected her people.

Before sunrise the next morning, she was dragged roughly from her cot and shipped off to the Boiling Rock.

* * *

Suki should have known by now that the princess was not through with her.

When she stepped, still handcuffed, from the gondola, it was to find herself inside of a waking nightmare. The whole prison was _hot—_ only to be expected, she supposed, for a structure that had been built in the middle of a boiling lake. There was no possibility of escape: even supposing one _did_ manage to get out of the prison proper, there was nowhere to go. A human's skin would slough off in seconds if they attempted to swim through the boiling water, and even supposing one miraculously managed to get past _that_ , there was still the ocean to contend with. While Suki might get out of this place if she was rescued, released, or dead, she couldn't see even a single option that would let her leave under her own power.

The warden was not a nice person, but _him_ she could handle. _He_ was nothing but a petty bully, drunk on power. Princess Azula (as her name turned out to be) was another story entirely.

Not two days after Suki's arrival, a pair of guards came to her cell.

"What?" she demanded as they slid open the door. "Did I do something _wrong?_ " The question was rhetorical. In the Fire Nation's eyes, people like her _existing_ counted as doing something wrong.

"The Princess wants to see you."

Suki hated the jolt of dread that shot through her at the thought of having to face the Fire Nation princess again. She also knew that she had no choice.

That was the first visit she got… but it was far from the last.

The timing was never predictable. Sometimes, whole weeks would pass by without Suki seeing the princess; sometimes she would stop by a mere day after her previous visit. Suki was pulled out of her cell, out of the exercise yard, out of the mess hall, and on one memorable occasion out of her bed in the middle of the night.

Sometimes, she wondered whether the unpredictability and apparent randomness was deliberate, to keep her always jumpy and on-guard, to make her feel like she could never _truly_ relax. If it was, it was working.

She lost sleep. She found herself jerking awake in the middle of the night, heart pounding. She knew that some of the older Warriors, the ones who'd fought in life-or-death battles and seen unspeakable horrors, would sometimes fly into an uncontrollable panic at the slightest provocation or for no apparent reason at all, jumping at shadows, still fighting battles that were long since over. Even if the reason for it no longer existed, their bodies and minds still remembered the fear.

This, though? This was real. This was happening to her _right now_.

It went like this: the guards would come for her. She would ask, outright, what she had done wrong. They would respond only that the princess was here to see her.

Sometimes, she would go along quietly, reasoning that the end result would be the same no matter _what_ she did and there was no reason to give herself more bruises than necessary. Sometimes, she'd fight with only her words, reeling off an ever-growing list of all the ways in which the Fire Nation was horrible and evil and ruining everyone else's lives. Sometimes, she'd have to be dragged (quite literally) kicking and screaming, because if she could have control over nothing else, she might as well make the princess do her own dirty work for a change and subdue her _personally_.

The absolute worst times were the ones where she all but ran to the meeting under her own power, because maybe, _this time_ , she'd finally get some solid information on how her girls were doing.

Then, it went like this: they'd strap her into the chair. Mostly, she cooperated (or didn't) consistently from the beginning to the end of this process, but not always. Sometimes, she'd walk into the room with no resistance only to break into a clawing panic because _they were not putting her into that chair_ , screaming she-didn't-know-what about the rest of her Warriors or the Avatar or Sokka, at which point it would take a pile-on of three or more guards and a stream of blue fire from the princess to pin her into submission. Others, she'd fight tooth and nail all the way to the interrogation room only for all the fight to go out of her the second she saw the chair and it hit her all over again that there was nothing she could do that would get her out of this.

Regardless of how hard they had to fight to get her into the chair, though, in the end they _would_ get her into that chair. Her arms and legs would be strapped down. Then, she would be made to open her jaw so the metal bar could be forced between her teeth.

That was when the session would _really_ begin.

It wasn't an interrogation: Suki couldn't have answered any questions even if she'd wanted to. It wasn't a conversation, either, for exactly the same reason. If she absolutely had to put a name to it, the only thing she could honestly call it was a torture session, because even though nobody was physically hurting her, she couldn't think of anything else in her life she'd faced with a deeper sense of dread and despair, or that had left her feeling more broken inside.

It went like this:

Princess Azula would tell her of a visit she'd paid to the prison back at the capital, how she'd gone to see her girls there and what she'd done to them. She'd wave a hand in Suki's face, lighting a blue flame on the tip of her finger for emphasis.

It went like this:

The princess would reenact her takeover of Ba Sing Se, along with all the other battles that had ended in glorious victory for the Fire Nation. She would gloat that the Avatar was dead and there was no one left to save them. She'd call the people of the other nations weak and pathetic, and hail the inevitability of the Fire Nation's victory.

It went…

…like…

* * *

Suki shot up with a gasp, the covers thrown from her body before she was even fully aware of where she was or what she was doing. Her heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was about to beat its way right out of her chest.

It had only been another nightmare. She was okay. Breathe. Just breathe.

Still breathing hard, she tried to ground herself by observing the room. About a third of the other beds were full, those of her girls who were off-duty getting what sleep they could before the start of their next shift. The angle of the single thin ribbon of sunlight that crept in between the barracks curtains told her that it was roughly mid-morning.

When they'd first accepted the position as royal bodyguards, Zuko had offered to give them all their own rooms in his own wing of the palace. To the surprise of absolutely no one except Zuko and Ty Lee, they'd all refused. Kyoshi Warriors stuck together.

…not to mention that ever since their reunion at the end of the War, Suki was prone to panicking if she ever had to spend too much time separated from her girls.

Looking around the room, her heart gradually slowing down to a normal rate now that she'd managed to ground herself, she saw that Ty Lee was also sitting up, and looked as if she had been for quite some time.

"Azula?" she whispered. Though there was no sign of distress showing on her face, her fingers were twisting nervously around and around each other.

Letting out a deep breath, Suki nodded. "Azula."

Suki and Ty Lee rarely shared the specific details of what Azula had done to them, and they had an unspoken agreement never to ask. Instead, they'd learned what not to do around each other, without necessarily having to know why. Sometimes, they messed up—like that time Ty Lee had playfully tried to hand-feed her some Fire Nation delicacy and Suki had violently knocked the chopsticks out of her hand before she'd even consciously registered what she was doing, or that time they'd been hunting down an assassin and Ty Lee had caught him via a truly impressive display of acrobatics, and Suki had tried to congratulate her with a friendly pat on the back, only for Ty Lee to end up a shaking, quivering mess curled up on the ground.

They didn't always do everything perfectly… but they _were_ learning, and that was what counted.

Now, without consultation, they both changed into their day clothes—no gear and no makeup; they weren't on duty. Suki still made sure to tuck a dagger into her belt before she left, but that was for self-defense and because she didn't like to go anywhere unarmed if she could help it, not because she was actually _expecting_ trouble.

A day spent browsing the sprawling Capital City market was often helpful in grounding her, of reminding her that yes, it really was over. It might not _fix_ all of her problems… but it did help. As they flitted from stall to stall, snacking on skewers of roasted meat or fruit dipped in boiled honey, Ty Lee holding up an ornate Fire Nation hairpiece or a length of red silk and exclaiming that it would look good on her, Suki felt her jitters slowly beginning to dissipate.

For Ty Lee, she knew, it was different. For most of _her_ life, Azula had _always_ been a specter and a threat hovering in the background regardless of where she was or what she was doing. Suki needed to spend time in a normal environment doing normal activities; for Ty Lee, it didn't matter _what_ they were doing so much as being in the company of someone she trusted.

By the time they finally felt ready to go back, the sun was setting and their shift was about to start. Upon their return to the barracks, the other girls did not question where they'd been or what they'd been doing, and they pulled on their uniforms and applied their makeup without a word.

Things would never go back to the way they were… but slowly, ever so slowly, they were beginning to heal.


End file.
